Rendering isn't a problem - this took about a minute. It's the subdivision that takes the resources. The higher value you set, the better the detail but my system [AMD Athlon XP 1800, 736 Mb RAM] stalls with a memory allocation error if I set it to 5 for this model (1360 polys). I forgot to mention that you need to change the texture file for this example from 16 bit to 8 bit.